By Lincoln Ellis - April 1, 2010
During our trip to Brazil, we have met with two groups (one in Salvador: www.stevebiko.org.br and one in Sao Paulo: www.educafro.org.br) that provide free prep-courses for Black students who are planning to take the “vestibular”, the college entrance exam. Each college or university has its own entrance exam, but the exams are fairly similar. Wealthy families usually send their children to extensive (and expensive) test preparation courses that have given these applicants a huge advantage on the test (not to mention the advantages that come from attending private schools with more resources and smaller class sizes). The Brazilian groups we met with teach free, year-long courses (usually meeting twice a week) that emphasize not only the academic subjects that will be tested, but also Black history and consciousness. The Educafro in Sao Paulo estimated that 10,000 black students have been admitted to Universities, usually with scholarships, as a result of 20 years of Educafro’s prep-courses.
We’ve been telling the Brazilian groups we’re meeting with that we came to Brazil in part to learn how to improve our own country. In other words, there are a lot of things that Brazilian organizations can teach us about how to structure legal and civil society efforts for racial equality. These prep courses are a perfect example.
Efforts in the U.S. to increase university admissions for Black, Latino and First Nations students have only sporadically attempted to provide courses to improve SAT scores. There might be a couple of reasons for this. There is a myth that the SAT tests innate intelligence so scores cannot be improved with coaching, so people may believe that prep-courses would not help increase the SAT scores of underrepresented minorities. This myth has been disproved. Alternatively, it is possible that U.S. activists have chosen to prioritize debunking the myth that SAT scores correlate with merit, through research on stereotype threats and the like. This explanation would be consistent consistent with the effort to increase the importance of other indicators of academic performance, such as grades, essays and letters of recommendation. (The Brazilian students we talked with thought that deemphasizing test scores in the university admissions process was a great idea, since Brazilian universities rely exclusively on these scores to make admissions decisions).
Even if U.S. civil rights groups decide that providing SAT prep courses for underrepresented minorities is not the best use of their resources, there is another lesson that we can learn from the Brazilian groups: that long term planning and strategy pay off. The Brazilian organizations ask students who take the test-prep course to make a year-long commitment, and the organizations themselves have made a decades-long commitment to continue this work. U.S. groups could benefit from this type of long-term outlook.
